Investigation: The US government is secretly selling thousands of protected wild horses for slaughter
The New York Times exposed the dark mechanism of selling protected horses for slaughter for economic gain.
Thousands of American wild horses are sold for slaughter every year through a mechanism designed to bypass the law. The horses are captured by US authorities using helicopters and held in pens for years. Buyers purchase the horses for $25 and sell them for slaughter at a huge profit.
About 73,000 wild mustangs live on federal public lands in the western United States, where they are ostensibly protected from hunting or capture. However, the US government captures tens of thousands of horses and sells some of them indirectly for slaughter, according to a comprehensive investigation published on Monday in The New York Times. The sale of wild horses by the Bureau of Land Management was previously rare, but began to rise after Donald Trump took office. In 2025, the number of horses sold jumped by more than 100%, reaching 3,700, according to official government records.
The move was ostensibly intended to maintain a sustainable population of horses, and the sale is carried out for horses that were captured and not adopted, to save millions of dollars. Over the years, the Bureau has put forward various lethal proposals to reduce the herds, including sniper fire, direct sale of horses to slaughterhouses, and the construction of gas chambers. But Congress, aware that the public wants to protect the mustangs, has banned the killing of healthy wild horses. The Bureau found a workaround.
The captured horses are held for years in a pen in Idaho, and some are transferred to American buyers who in turn sell them for slaughter in Canada, where, unlike in the United States, it is legal to slaughter wild horses. The US government can spend more than $3,000 to capture a mustang and bring it to market, but sells each one for only $25. A horse can be sold for up to $750 at a slaughterhouse — and this profit potential continues to attract buyers. On the government's side, handing over the horse instead of continuing to keep it saves about $56 million a year.
"It used to be rare to see a mustang at auctions, and if we did see them, they were usually old," Claire Staples of the Skydog Ranch horse sanctuary told the American newspaper. "But now we are seeing a huge influx, and most of these horses are young — two or three years old. These are the horses that are easiest to train, and they should be easy to adopt."
She purchased three mustangs at one of the auctions and moved them to her sanctuary in Oregon. "We are only able to save a few," she said. "Most of them go to buyers who purchase them for slaughter."
